Abstract: Standards have been transformed from modern means of production to important tools related to national security, national ecological development and changes in economic life. Along with the role of standardization in social and economic development, the number of standards shows blowout growth, involving all trades and professions. However, the quality of the new standards is not uniform, so more and more attention has been paid to the governance of standards. Standardization policy is the most direct manifestation of standardization management. Since the reform and opening up, China has promulgated a series of relevant national standardization policies, which is an important basis for the reform of China’s standardization system. 
This paper collects 245 standardization policies at the national level from 1979 to 2017. Based on the textual characteristics of policies in different periods (number of papers, intergovernmental relations, theme changes), the process of standardization reform is analyzed from the policy level. Based on the typical key events or key documents in the process of standardization development in China, this paper divides the period of 1979-2017 into four main stages: the establishment stage of institutional framework from 1979 to 2001; the innovation stage from 2002 to 2008; the multi-level diversification stage from 2009 to 2014; and the open governance stage from 2015 to 2017.
Through the information of the publishing units of standardization policy texts, this paper uses Gephi to analyze the social network of the publishing units in which co-publishing exists, so as to study the inter-governmental relationship network among the publishing units and excavate the cooperation among the publishing units. Subsequently, the R language package is used to segment policy texts, remove irrelevant words, obtain annual high-frequency words, and draw overall word cloud. In this paper, the high-frequency words in different stages are analyzed and the evolution process of standardization policy theme is preliminarily understood. Finally, this paper uses content analysis to analyze the keywords and key policies of each stage of standardization policy, so as to study the evolution route of standardization policy and explore the development track and general rules of standardization management in China.
The results show that from the analysis of the number of policies and the publishing units, we can see that the government’s supply capacity for standardization policies has been continuously strengthened, the effectiveness of policy issuance has been expanded, and the application fields of standards have been expanded; from the analysis of inter-governmental cooperation relations among publishing units, we can see that the standardization system has gradually been reformed, and standards have become the link between technological innovation and market innovation, showing synergistic development with innovation and industry; from the corresponding analysis results of the keywords, we can see that the focus of standardization policy in different periods is spreading with the technological change, penetrating into more levels, the emergence of standards stimulates the burst of market vitality; from the analysis of the evolution of the theme of standardization policy, we can see that the government is actively guiding standardization to become an important link in the value chain of new technology and industrial development, and standards become one of the driving forces behind the rise of emerging markets.

Key words: standard policy, policy evolution, content analysis, text mining